1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, multi-core processors including a plurality of operation units such as processor cores (hereinafter, referred to as cores) integrated in one package have been developed. In a multi-core processor, processing is distributed to each of the plurality of cores for parallel processing, thus achieving an improved processing performance.
Specifically, there have been some propositions regarding image forming apparatuses such as MFPs (multi-function printers) and printers which use such a multi-core processor to assign each process to the cores for parallel processing, thus increasing in print processing speed.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2004-326307 discloses an image forming apparatus including a plurality of processors. In this image forming apparatus, the processing of printing image data is divided into a plurality of processes, and each processor handles at least one of the plurality of processes. The assignment of the processes to the processors is controlled based on the processing status of each process handled by the processors so that the process handled by each processor is changed according to the processing load of each of the processors.
In the conventional art of Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2004-326307, however, when an event which prevents processing from being continued occurs (for example, the event may be a case waiting for a vacant region in a memory region used in each processing executed to generate print data for forming an image on paper or the like), the core which is executing the processing including the event is to be in a standby mode until the event is dissolved. This reduces the processing efficiency.